A ONCE-SIMPLE story has become far too convoluted for anyone but the most obsessive to follow. The original question was this: Did the leak of CIA employee Valerie Wilson Plame’s identity to columnist Robert Novak violate federal law?

A special prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, was assigned to answer that question more than two years ago.

Just to remind you: Plame is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, the former ambassador whom the CIA sent to Niger to investigate whether Iraq was buying uranium yellowcake. Wilson later claimed that because of his findings, the Bush White House had knowingly been lying about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear threat. (The Senate Intelligence Committee later flatly called Wilson a liar for making this claim.)

Novak’s original syndicated column of July 14, 2003, was an effort to explain how former Clinton White House official Joe Wilson had been tasked with a sensitive assignment by the Bush administration’s CIA. The answer, according to Novak’s column: “His wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him.”

Now, with 11 days to go before Fitzgerald is due to wrap up his investigation, Novak’s name is almost never mentioned in relation to the case.

Instead, all the talk is of Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter who never published a story on the case – yet spent 85 days in jail for refusing to answer Fitzgerald’s questions about it. And there is intense speculation that Fitzgerald is going to indict either President Bush’s closest aide, Karl Rove, or Dick Cheney’s closest aide, Scooter Libby.

What’s especially interesting about this whole business is that Fitzgerald has known for more than a year who told Novak that Valerie Plame Wilson worked for the CIA. How do I know this? Because if Fitzgerald didn’t know, Novak would be sitting in jail right now.

Given that Fitzgerald threw Judith Miller into the pokey for not revealing a source on the story and was about to send Time magazine’s Matt Cooper there too before Time relented, we can assume Novak told Fitzgerald everything there was to tell about his column. And did so more than a year ago.

Why is this so interesting? Because if Fitzgerald had determined that a crime had been committed in the Novak column – either in the writing of it or the sourcing of it – it seems likely he’d have indicted somebody by now.

Press accounts of this matter seem to presume that Fitzgerald must wait until his investigation is a day from completion before issuing indictments. Not so.

Think back to the days of Kenneth Starr: His grand jury issued indictments throughout the four-year Whitewater investigation. Long before he heard of Monica Lewinsky, Starr had secured convictions of Justice Department official Webb Hubbell and Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker.

Think about it. If Fitzgerald believed there was a criminal conspiracy inside the Bush administration to trash Wilson by outing his wife’s identity, the best route to unraveling that conspiracy would be to indict one member of it and get that person to name the other conspirators.

Now, it may be that information gleaned solely from Judith Miller over the past two weeks and from Karl Rove’s fourth appearance before Fitzgerald’s grand jury on Friday means big trouble for the White House.

Or Fitzgerald may just be dotting every “i” and crossing every “t” in order to ensure that he understands every detail of every matter in this case – in part to ensure that those whom he does not indict don’t have a shadow of doubt hanging over their heads.

One final point. There is great puzzlement over Judith Miller’s role in this case, especially since she never published a story about it. But the prosecutor has a major bone to pick with Miller on a matter that has nothing to do with Valerie Wilson Plame.

Fitzgerald took Miller to court to get her to reveal a leak inside his own office – in a case in which Miller arguably committed a great offense against national security.

In December 2001, Fitzgerald was preparing to issue indictments against the Holy Land Foundation, which he had determined was a fund-raising front for radical Islamic terror groups. His office was preparing to stage a midnight raid on the Holy Land Foundation’s headquarters. Just then, Miller called the Holy Land Foundation seeking comment on the pending indictments.

Fitzgerald evidently believes Miller’s phone call led to a shredding party at the foundation’s headquarters in Richardson, Texas – thus preventing him from getting at files that might have revealed important information about domestic U.S. support for terrorists.

Eager to know who in his office had leaked information that had caused such damage to his case, Fitzgerald subpoenaed Miller’s phone records. But the case landed in the New York courtroom of the leftist U.S. District Court Judge Robert Sweet. Sweet ruled – in the same week as a D.C. court compelled Miller to comply with Fitzgerald’s subpoena in the Plame case – that The New York Times did not have to surrender Miller’s phone records to Fitzgerald.

If you want to understand why Fitzgerald came down so hard on Judith Miller, maybe this story of Miller’s indefensible conduct in the Holy Land matter might offer you a clue.

As for what else the prosecutor is up to, the next two weeks will tell the tale – but Bush’s enemies should prepare themselves emotionally for the fact that the Fitzgerald tale might be one about how no crime was committed.